I
It is now more than ten years since I met, for the last time, Michael
Robartes, and for the first time and the last time his friends and
fellow students; and witnessed his and their tragic end, and endured
those strange experiences, which have changed me so that my writings
have grown less popular and less intelligible, and driven me almost
to the verge of taking the habit of St. Dominic. I had just published
Rosa Alchemica, a little work on the Alchemists, somewhat in the
manner of Sir Thomas Browne, and had received many letters from
believers in the arcane sciences, upbraiding what they called my
timidity, for they could not believe so evident sympathy but the
sympathy of the artist, which is half pity, for everything which has
moved men's hearts in any age. I had discovered, early in my
researches, that their doctrine was no merely chemical phantasy, but
a philosophy they applied to the world, to the elements and to man
himself; and that they sought to fashion gold out of common metals
merely as part of an universal transmutation of all things into some
divine and imperishable substance; and this enabled me to make my
little book a fanciful reverie over the transmutation of life into
art, and a cry of measureless desire for a world made wholly of
essences.
I was sitting dreaming of what I had written, in my house in one of
the old parts of Dublin; a house my ancestors had made almost famous
through their part in the politics of the city and their friendships
with the famous men of their generations; and was feeling an unwonted
happiness at having at last accomplished a long-cherished design, and
made my rooms an expression of this favourite doctrine. The
portraits, of more historical than artistic interest, had gone; and
tapestry, full of the blue and bronze of peacocks, fell over the
doors, and shut out all history and activity untouched with beauty
and peace; and now when I looked at my Crevelli and pondered on the
rose in the hand of the Virgin, wherein the form was so delicate and
precise that it seemed more like a thought than a flower, or at the
grey dawn and rapturous faces of my Francesca, I knew all a
Christian's ecstasy without his slavery to rule and custom; when I
pondered over the antique bronze gods and goddesses, which I had
mortgaged my house to buy, I had all a pagan's delight in various
beauty and without his terror at sleepless destiny and his labour
with many sacrifices; and I had only to go to my bookshelf, where
every book was bound in leather, stamped with intricate ornament, and
of a carefully chosen colour: Shakespeare in the orange of the glory
of the world, Dante in the dull red of his anger, Milton in the blue
grey of his formal calm; and I could experience what I would of human
passions without their bitterness and without satiety. I had gathered
about me all gods because I believed in none, and experienced every
pleasure because I gave myself to none, but held myself apart,
individual, indissoluble, a mirror of polished steel: I looked in the
triumph of this imagination at the birds of Hera, glowing in the
firelight as though they were wrought of jewels; and to my mind, for
which symbolism was a necessity, they seemed the doorkeepers of my
world, shutting out all that was not of as affluent a beauty as their
own; and for a moment I thought as I had thought in so many other
moments, that it was possible to rob life of every bitterness except
the bitterness of death; and then a thought which had followed this
thought, time after time, filled me with a passionate sorrow. All
those forms: that Madonna with her brooding purity, those rapturous
faces singing in the morning light, those bronze divinities with
their passionless dignity, those wild shapes rushing from despair to
despair, belonged to a divine world wherein I had no part; and every
experience, however profound, every perception, however exquisite,
would bring me the bitter dream of a limitless energy I could never
know, and even in my most perfect moment I would be two selves, the
one watching with heavy eyes the other's moment of content. I had
heaped about me the gold born in the crucibles of others; but the
supreme dream of the alchemist, the transmutation of the weary heart
into a weariless spirit, was as far from me as, I doubted not, it had
been from him also. I turned to my last purchase, a set of alchemical
apparatus which, the dealer in the Rue le Peletier had assured me,
once belonged to Raymond Lully, and as I joined the _alembic_ to
the _athanor_ and laid the _lavacrum maris_ at their side,
I understood the alchemical doctrine, that all beings, divided from
the great deep where spirits wander, one and yet a multitude, are
weary; and sympathized, in the pride of my connoisseurship, with the
consuming thirst for destruction which made the alchemist veil under
his symbols of lions and dragons, of eagles and ravens, of dew and of
nitre, a search for an essence which would dissolve all mortal
things. I repeated to myself the ninth key of Basilius Valentinus, in
which he compares the fire of the last day to the fire of the
alchemist, and the world to the alchemist's furnace, and would have
us know that all must be dissolved before the divine substance,
material gold or immaterial ecstasy, awake. I had dissolved indeed
the mortal world and lived amid immortal essences, but had obtained
no miraculous ecstasy. As I thought of these things, I drew aside the
curtains and looked out into the darkness, and it seemed to my
troubled fancy that all those little points of light filling the sky
were the furnaces of innumerable divine alchemists, who labour
continually, turning lead into gold, weariness into ecstasy, bodies
into souls, the darkness into God; and at their perfect labour my
mortality grew heavy, and I cried out, as so many dreamers and men of
letters in our age have cried, for the birth of that elaborate
spiritual beauty which could alone uplift souls weighted with so many
dreams.